Astrophotography is like racing, the more money you throw at it, the better you are going to do.
True, but at some level you reach a point of diminishing returns. What I mean is, after you reach a certain level of equipment, throwing more money at it will only get you small improvements. I think you have done extremely well with what you have.
Someone posted this question earlier - have you tried stacking shorter exposures as opposed to one super-long exposure? I find that this works very well, but it is more time consuming.
Someone posted this question earlier - have you tried stacking shorter exposures as opposed to one super-long exposure? I find that this works very well, but it is more time consuming.
Incredible deep-sky images. Amateur astrophotography has come a long, long way. Yours is as good or better than the old Palomar collection that used to be the defacto standard in astronomical imaging back in the days before CCDs.
Yes, I do image stack some of my shots. I use Registar which is probably the best there is. Guys like Jerry Lodriguss turned me onto that program years ago. Its expensive but you can take images from any camera taken with different equipment, even jpegs of star charts and merge them. Plus it does multiple formats as well.
My shot of the Orion Nebulae is a composite of 1min, 15min and 30min exposures. Stacking short exposures works well for signal to noise but to get the faint stuff, you have to go deep especially with the one shot color camera which is not as sensitive as its BXW cousin. I can take that image and apply unsharp masking to sharpen the stars but as I said, I don't like that look.
There is a picture of the Orion Nebulae in the NASA picture of the day archives (fairly recent) that is downright creepy looking it has been sharpened so much. I think once you open that raw exposure in Photoshop, Science becomes art and its just personal taste that determines what gets saved as a final.
Is it This one?, I'm thinking about buing a scope next fall and have narrowed my choices down to that one but I've been looking for decent images on the net taken with it.
I'm an astrophotographer too, though I haven't done a whole lot of deep sky stuff with digital yet. I work with the Madison Astronomical Society and my own employer, the Madison School District, and use CCD cameras quite a bit, though not recently. The school district observatory (which I coordinate) owns an ST7, and the MAS has access to similar CCD cameras.
Your horsehead pic is awesome, obviously an RGB combined shot. Great work!
Whoops, thought this was a new thread. I see I've even replied to it once already. ;-)
